Months go, I reviewed Windows Vista, and concluded: "All in all, I am impressed by Windows Vista [...]. Windows Vista is better than XP, and definitely more than just an improved look as many say." After 5 months of usage, it is time to put that statement into perspective.

"On modern hardware Vista is faster."
Irrelevant, you avoided the statement. On the same hardware Vista is slower than XP, Ubuntu & OS X.

"Roughly the same time or 2-5 seconds slower than XP (15 vs 20 seconds). Which is still considerably faster than OSX, not to mention Linux."
Where did you pull this figure from?? A fresh install of OS X boots in 30-35 seconds and shuts down in 5-10 seconds. I ran Vista on the same hardware (1.83GHzCD 1.5GB RAM) and it took 1:30 to boot up and far too long to shut down, compared to 45 seconds to start with XP

"No big deal, considering 2GB will be standart at the end of the year."
Yes big deal. Having to upgrade solely because your OS is slow and bloated is throwing good money away. Where is the value in having to buy Vista, new RAM and the game, or a new machine entirely? You seem to have decided to stop thinking because you have money to burn.

I think what he means by the "modern hardware" bit is that given a lot of RAM, Vista will start up faster than XP. I don't know for sure if it actually is faster, since I haven't booted XP on the same hardware in a long time, but Vista does have some new boot-time caching technology to improve startup speed, but it requires at least a gig of RAM to be effective. One thing that is extremely noticeable on Vista is that the machine is quite responsive as soon as it's booted up. You don't get that 10-20 second bubble in which you can see the UI and watch programs start up in the systray without being able to do anything. The hard-drive will be going for longer than XP because of the caching, but actually launching programs during this period is fast.

I personally think OS X has great boot times and would not call Vista faster than it. On the other hand, I don't think Vista is significantly slower either. 1:30 for bootup is far too long. Take a look in the Event Viewer under Windows Logs->Diagnostics-Performance. That'll likely help you figure out what's causing your system to go slow.

I ran Vista on the same hardware (1.83GHzCD 1.5GB RAM) and it took 1:30 to boot up and far too long to shut down, compared to 45 seconds to start with XP

Definitely drivers or/and third-party software issue.

Yes big deal. Having to upgrade solely because your OS is slow and bloated is throwing good money away. Where is the value in having to buy Vista, new RAM and the game, or a new machine entirely? You seem to have decided to stop thinking because you have money to burn.

If you are gamer you have to upgrade not because of Vista (which itself uses just ~300mb), but because for upcoming games 2GB is minimum amount to play comfortably.

The actual bootup process feels a bit slower on linux but that depends on how its messured
If we take into count that linux is detecting new hardware each time its booted and the fact that it dosn't load a couple of programs like antiviurus antispyware and a firewall which is often the case of any windows based machine, then Linux might ewen be faster to boot. Windows Xp detects new hardware when its booted up so sometimes the user has to deal with installing drivers for different fings and do at least one reboot before he or she can start to actual use the computer

so the question is:
Is the bootup process messured from the moment the user push the startbuttom to the moment he or she can start to use the computer, or is it messured from the startbutton is pushed to the moment in witch the user can type in their username and password?
Most windows XP users dont ewen have a username and pasword that needs to be typed in